DMNews spends a few minutes with Peter Baron, president, AdmissionsQuest

Q: What led AdmissionsQuest to hire HubSpot to help optimize its Web site?

A: We were taking a hard look at the technical infrastructure that supports AdmissionsQuest.com, an online resource where families and students can learn more about boarding school opportunities in the US and abroad, as well as find ways to afford school, and access articles. We were wondering how we could go about positioning the site in a better way with search engines. After I ran my site through HubSpot's site grader, I contacted the company about our need to optimize.

Q: What were the goals of the search campaign?

A: What we wanted to do with AdmissionsQuest.com was make it more search engine-friendly and, at the same time, to increase our traf­fic. We wanted to see more families looking at the site. And conversely, we wanted to bring on more schools to take memberships with us.

Q: Can you describe the elements of the search campaign?

A: We worked on our URL structure and attempted to better optimize the pages. We started focusing more on long-tail keywords like “California boarding schools,” “private girls school” and “East Coast board­ing schools.” Additionally, we used HubSpot to build pages that speak directly to those selected keyword phrases. We also started to work very hard on getting the word out to a larger audience and, as a result, we've seen the number of links back to our site increase over the past three or four months.

Q: What challenges did you face?

A: Our site speaks to two audi­ences, prospective students and the parents of students. You never know who is going to initiate the search, parents or students, so we have to be cognizant of each group's con­cerns and interests when building our pages and writing our content.

Q: What have been the results you've seen so far?

A: It really started to hit in January after about two months of working with HubSpot. What we've seen is an increase from about 25,000 visitors a month to close to 40,000. And I attribute a good portion of that growth to our working with them for optimization, which we plan to continue doing.